# LR Editorials (Apr. 1980) **URL:** **Published:** April 2, 1980 --- “Poverty and crime, women and the draft, and to each his own foreign policy.” ## Poverty and crime Every public opinion poll which poses the question discovers that most Americans regard violent crime as one of the most serious problems our society faces. And all indications are that it is growing more serious — because more commonplace — by the day. “Since 1960,” says _Time_, “the rate of robbery, murder and rape has almost tripled.” And every study of the demographics of such violent crime shows that an altogether disproportionate amount of it is committed by unemployed black youths between the ages of 14 and 22. In Oakland, California, for example, nearly 40 percent of all serious crimes are committed by youngsters between the ages of 14 and 17, and more than 80 percent of these youngsters are poor and black. Their victims are usually black too. Blacks make up about 11 percent of the U.S. population, but they shoulder 14 percent of the annual nationwide violent crime bill. During 1977, more blacks were killed by other blacks (typically during armed robberies) than were killed in the entire Vietnam War—a war in which blacks participated as soldiers to an extent entirely disproportionate to their presence in the population. In recognition of these problems, the National Bar Association sponsored a national conference early this year on “Black on Black Crime.” The conference (which was held in Oakland, a city whose population is nearly 50 percent black) attracted legal and law enforcement professionals, journalists, and black community leaders from all over the United States; and certain of its findings deserve to be much more widely publicized than they have been thus far. Robert Maynard, the longtime _Washington Post_ reporter and editorial writer who recently took over editorship of the _Oakland Tribune_, opened the conference with a keynote address in which he emphasized that street crime “tends to rise in some relationship to how many teenagers are on the streets without constructive activities or work.” His theme was picked up and echoed by Charles Sanders, managing editor of _Ebony_ magazine. “When the legitimate roads to personal achievement and material rewards are blocked or narrowed,” Sanders told the conferees, “people will resort to illegal means to survive.” A 16-year-old black criminal interviewed anonymously by the _Oakland Tribune_ in conjunction with its coverage of the conference made the point even more straightforwardly. “Why are so many serious crimes committed by youngsters under 17 years old?” the _Tribune_ asked him. “To get some money,” he answered. “To do what they have to do, they take what they have to take. If their mothers and fathers aren’t working, they have to survive the best they can. Everybody has to get some money. Mostly, people’ll do anything to get money.” “How about getting a job to make money?” the _Tribune_ asked. “There ain’t no jobs,” 16-year-old “Charles” answered. “If you go for a job when you’re 15, they say come back when you’re 18. When you’re 18, they say come back when you’re 21.” The unemployment statistics bear out “Charles’s” vision of things. According to the _Tribune_, more than half the young people between 16 and 22 in Oakland’s black ghetto are unemployed. Nationally, slightly less than half of such teenagers are unable to find jobs. Predictably, this link between black youth unemployment and black youth crime led some participants in the Black on Black Crime conference to call for increased government involvement in the problem. U.S. Attorney G. William Hunter, NAACP attorney Charles Carter, and California state legislator Elihu Harris all “criticized government officials for a waning interest in the funding of programs which could reduce unemployment,” according to the _Tribune_, and “noted that the education system is failing blacks, causing many to graduate as functional illiterates.” But, refreshingly, other participants in the conference seemed unimpressed by the idea of more government programs. Dr. Gary Mendez, an official of the National Urban League, laid his own skepticism on the line. “I have a question about this whole issue of programs,” he told the conferees. “I don’t know that we need new programs so much. If we educate our children so they could fill out job applications, maybe there wouldn’t be a youth unemployment problem. If they had jobs, there wouldn’t be a need for welfare services. If we get into the mentality that all we need are new government programs, that’s wrong. Don’t ask for new programs to educate children. Just make sure yours is.” One might question Dr. Mendez’s suggestion that the inability of many 16-year-old blacks to fill out employment applications is the only thing standing between them and jobs. As “Charles,” the anonymous young black criminal reminds us, “if you go for a job when you’re 15, they say come back when you’re 18. When you’re 18, they say come back when you’re 21.” After all, how could it be otherwise? Federal and state child labor laws make it impossible for businessmen to employ anyone under 18 unless they are willing to entangle themselves in miles of bureaucratic red tape and invest extraordinary time and money in a worker who, because he or she is an inexperienced teenager, probably isn’t worth the investment. And this problem is only exacerbated by the federal and state laws which require businessmen to pay a minimum wage. The labor of inexperienced teenagers is simply not worth the minimum wage—and neither is the labor of 18-to 21-year-old workers who have been kept out of the labor force by child labor laws and are therefore inexperienced and inefficient when they finally enter it. A marginal business in a black ghetto literally cannot afford to offer a job to an unemployed black youth; government programs have made it impossible. Still, one should not underestimate the importance of the public school system to the problem of black youth unemployment. The schools do produce functional illiterates. And someone who can neither read nor write well enough to cope with a job application is unlikely to find work. But the problem with the public schools is not that they aren’t funded well enough to teach children to read. As the 1960s have become the ’70s and the ’70s have given way to the ’80s, our public school teachers and administrators have been spending ever more and more money to do an ever less and less adequate job of educating an ever dwindling student population. The problem with the public schools, as educational historian and critic Joel Spring points out elsewhere in this issue, is that, in the words of Ellison Brown, an Oakland social worker who attended the Black on Black Crime conference, they are “trying to teach kids what to think instead of how to think.” The kind of thinking we call reading is only one of many examples. And while some government programs are forcing black youths out of the job market and helping to make sure that they haven’t the skills to compete in it once they’re old enough to work legally, other government programs are making it impossible for them to start their own businesses and employ themselves. In order to do that, they have to come up not only with investment capital, but also with the license fees established by government (fees which, as in the case of taxi licenses, often exceed the amount of investment capital needed merely to start the business) —to say nothing of the often immense sums they need to conform to “health and safety” regulations, building codes, and the like. The same politicians who cry crocodile tears over the plight of the poor think nothing of forbidding a ghetto mother to start a neighborhood child care center which would bring economic benefits to everyone in the neighborhood, because her ceiling is one inch too low. Better, the politicians apparently believe, that the ghetto mother should collect welfare while her children, once they become teenagers, enroll in a government-funded or government-run program of jobs for young people. Yet if anything at all is obvious about the plight of the poor in our society, it is that such programs don’t work. As Joan Kennedy Taylor argues elsewhere in this issue, our welfare programs only trap the poor in their poverty and give government almost unlimited license to run their lives and pry into their most personal affairs. And as for government funded jobs for youth, listen to the testimony of one Oakland social worker who described the futility of such programs at the Black on Black Crime conference: “You want to help kids with a summer program that gives them a part-time job at minimum wage?” he asked the conferees. “Hell, any one of these kids can buy half an ounce of marijuana, roll it up into joints and make $50 in one day. And that’s with no taxes.” Simply put, ghetto youths have no economic incentive to join jobs for youth programs. And whose fault is it that starting a marijuana business is such a more attractive alternative? Government. It is government which has systematically made it impossible for ghetto residents to start any other kind of business, and it is government which has driven the price of marijuana to its present heights by banning its possession and sale. A weed which can be grown easily in any backyard in the United States cannot be sold for $100 an ounce in a free market. In a government-created and government-sustained black market, it can. There is widespread agreement that poverty, unemployment and a generalized feeling of helplessness and hopelessness lie behind the high rate of violent crime among black youths. But there is as yet far too little recognition—especially among its victims—that government itself is the principal cause of the poverty, unemployment and impotence—and therefore of the crime. Those who consider the libertarian belief in individual initiative and the value of bootstrapping oneself upward economically an unrealistic pipedream should consider the institution which has rendered it unrealistic and ask themselves if it is realistic to expect that same institution to set things right again. —JR ## Women and the draft Two thousand protesters in Times Square. Three thousand in Beverly Hills. President Carter seems to have opened up a can of worms with his call for draft registration, and the worm has turned. The reaction of individual women and of representatives of organized women’s groups interviewed by the _San Francisco Chronicle_ was, in the words of a reporter, “entirely negative.” A new organization sprang up even before the presidential announcement on February 8, the National Organization of Women Against Registration (NO WAR) and accused government and the military of using the issue of women’s rights “to serve their interests rather than our own.” Betty Friedan told a _Washington Post_ reporter that the draft is a red herring: “The issue isn’t whether women should be drafted. Every woman I know, from feminists to right-to-lifers, is opposed to the draft, period.” One San Francisco fifteen-year-old summed it all up. “I think that those who vote to have a war should be the ones who have to fight it,” she said. The massive invasion of human rights that registration for the draft represents has as much to do with domestic control as with foreign policy. It is significant that Carter’s chief domestic policy advisor, Stuart Eizenstat, rather than someone from the State Department, was the dignitary chosen to talk to the media and say that registration would “send a strong message to the Soviet Union that this country is resolved to do what is necessary in the long run to meet its aggression.” How? By making our own citizens less free? And as for Rosalyn Carter’s statement at a fundraising breakfast that the call for draft registration was intended to “keep our country at peace,” that is really 1984 doubletalk: war is peace; slavery is freedom. The President’s decision to register women while proclaiming that he has “no intention” of changing the present military policy that allows women in combat support positions (i.e. doing things like piloting helicopters, driving trucks, and even launching missiles in areas where they will be shot at), but not in combat itself, has made it clear that women have no seniority in our culture. They are the last to be allowed certain opportunities to choose, and the first to be called on for sacrifice. In World War II, for example, the members of the Women Air Force Service Pilots (WASPs) ferried planes and towed anti-aircraft targets from 1942 until 1944 but were given no veteran’s benefits—not even funeral expenses for the 38 WASPs that were killed in action. Many women are quite understandably incensed by the fact that, as Beverly Stephens of the _New York News Syndicate_ puts it, “too many men are always eager for women to accept the _burden_ of equality but not the _benefit_.” Bella Abzug’s answer to the call to register women was to say, “When American women have equality of opportunity, it will be time enough to talk about equality of sacrifice.” Unfortunately, such a statement implies that it is all right for the government to require any kind of sacrifice from its citizens, as long as it does so equally. And in their desire for equality before the law, many women, and women’s groups, have let themselves thus be drawn into accepting the legitimacy of the draft. The National Organization for Women has announced that women as well as men should be called if there is a draft, and Julia Arri, the national president of the Business and Professional Women’s Club issued a statement saying that “we believe, as the President does, that equal rights means equal responsibility.” This position only plays into the Administration’s hands. President Carter must have advisors who know a lot of advertising. Because the American people are being sold a proposal to put _every young person in the country_ into government computer records, beginning with those born in 1960 and going on indefinitely—presumably until the entire population is on file a generation from now. This is a very scary, Orwellian prospect; it doesn’t take much imagination to think of all kinds of ways besides a draft in which the government could use this information to invade our privacy and violate our rights. But this horrendous proposal has been packaged with advertising genius. First of all, there’s the reassuring choice of the Post Office as the place in which to register. Who could associate that monument of inefficiency, the bumbling old U.S. Snail, with Big Brotherism or militarism? Probably, we think subliminally, they will lose half the records. And Betty Friedan is right: the question of drafting women is indeed a “red herring.” One of the principles of successful selling is to give people a choice of how they want to buy something—do I want the walnut veneer or the contemporary concrete finish? Will I send in the coupon or call the toll free number? Advertising experts find that this gets people so involved in a secondary decision that they make the primary one without noticing—they forget to ask themselves if they want to buy at all. Today, the media are full of discussions about women and the draft. Should women be drafted? Should they refuse to register until the ERA is ratified, or should they register, hoping that will help the ERA? And we forget that by arguing about whether or not women should be included, we tacitly accept the draft as a permissible option. But it is not. The draft is wrong. Spreading the burden of that wrong more evenly doesn’t make it right. The proper answer for women to give to the President is this: women can resist the draft as well as men can. —JKT ## Time for the real truth > Is that calamitous \[Federal\] budget due perhaps to defense expenditures? That, of course, is what liberals have been screaming in unison for years. As usual, what liberals scream in unison is not so. —William Simon, _A Time For Truth_ Well, starting next year what liberals scream in unison will indeed be so. We’re talking about the new Carter budget, of course; it proposes spending $696-billion in fiscal year 1981, and about $162-billion of that on the military. To appreciate those figures, you must realize that they represent an overall budget increase of 6.45 percent, and a “defense” budget hike of 14.3 percent. Non-military expenditures are essentially unchanged; their increases come to about 4 percent, well below the rate of inflation. Therefore it is the Pentagon, and only the Pentagon, which will enjoy a real increase in what it sucks from the public trough. And unless something is done this will happen again in the years to come: Jimmy Carter, embracing the current war hysteria, has pledged to boost military spending by at least 5 percent, over and above inflation, each and every year for the next five years. Will we hear as much as one peep of protest from Simon \& Co., or will they only continue to scream in unison that the sorry state of the budget is due to welfare expenditures? Given their past record, we can safely expect them to scream away. Simon and his fellow conservatives will also, no doubt, scream in unison that the welfare state is a far greater threat to America than the warfare state—and besides, we must arm to the teeth to keep Leonid Brezhnev out of Iowa. That last is certainly a lie: The great bulk of the Pentagon’s non-nuclear forces—conservatively estimated by Dr. Earl Ravenal as between $70-billion and $80-billion—is devoted to the demands of an interventionist foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, not to the defense of the United States. So too with Carter’s proposed defense boost. Its centerpiece is the so-called Rapid Deployment Force, specially designed to swoop down on Middle Eastern oil fields, which will require a fleet of ships loaded with munitions (the T-AKX Maritime Prepositioning Ship, costing about $100 million a copy), cruising near potential trouble spots, and a new cargo plane, the CX, to carry soldiers and equipment (the Air Force’s current jet cargo cargo plane, the C-5A, is deemed unsuitable for the role due to the tendency of its wings to fall off). Ships and plane are expected to cost a total of $10-billion and will surely cost more. Figures for the CX increase every time the Army ups the weight estimates on its XM-1 battle tank—another dubious weapons system that bulks large in the Carter budget. One of the CX’s chief purposes, notes Alexander Cockburn of the _Village Voice_, will be to carry the XM-1, “boondoggle within the womb of boondoggle, secure in the amniotic fluid of the tax dollar, yours and mine.” But the cost of the Rapid Deployment Force, ungodly as it is, pales into insignificance compared to that of the various nuclear weapons programs. Chief among these is the MX missile, well known to our regular readers, which will cost an estimated $55-billion (Senator Proxmire puts it at $70-billion), and the Trident submarine program, which will cost more than $25-billion. Writing in the _Nation_ (December 22, 1979), defense analyst Fred Kaplan concludes that the defense budget also contains hidden preparations for a revived B-1 bomber, which cost $25-billion when it was cancelled in 1977. (_Armed Forces Journal International_ for May of 1978 revealed that the Air Force had faked the case for the B-1. But California Congresscritters Charles Wilson and Robert K. Dornan still want the B-1 to “express to the Soviets American resolve. \[sic\]”) Compare these figures with the most expensive proposal on the liberal agenda: the $25-billion Carter-Long national health insurance scheme (Teddy Kennedy’s $40-billion plan is, thankfully, a political non-starter). It is hardly obvious that the warfare state is to be preferred to the welfare one, even setting aside the fact that these weapons systems will greatly increase the risk of nuclear holocaust, something the National Tea Tasters Board could never do. And even in peacetime, the warfare state has a uniquely malign effect on the economy. Unlike transfer payments such as Social Security, food stamps, and the like, which mainly redistribute consumption, military programs sop up skilled labor, materials and capital goods that could otherwise be devoted to something useful. This is not inflation —though many economists expect higher defense spending to bring inflation, as the Federal Reserve eases the resulting credit crunch by expanding the money supply — but something worse: a real loss in production. More: these programs inevitably commandeer a disproportionate share of capital goods and research efforts, which in the long run will cripple civilian productivity, as Seymour Melman demonstrates in his books _Pentagon Capitalism_ and _The Permanent War Economy_. Coming on top of 40 years of a war economy, this arms buildup should prove more ruinous than any in the past. _The Christian Science Monitor_ (February 8, 1980) notes that several strategic materials and classes of skilled workers are already in short supply; the _Monitor_ sees the Pentagon imposing “a large-scale redirection of the civilian economy” (including “possible wage and price controls”) through its existing priority rating system whereby a military project may be declared to have “all-out priority over civilian material needs.” Such a system, which would sound the death knell for what remains of our free enterprise economy, would be no more than a continuation of a long-term historical trend; most features of the command economy were first introduced as wartime expedients. The conservatives’ silence on the war economy has precedent abroad. In the 1950’s Pierre Poujade led a tax revolt that bid fair to roll back the state in France. Yet Poujadism collapsed; mainly because the Poujad-ists wanted France to crush the Algerian revolution and feared that serious tax cuts would prevent this. Similarly, conservative devotion to American imperialism may yet strangle the U.S. tax revolt in its cradle (though happily, the powerful National Taxpayers’ Union denounced the Carter arms budget in a February 10 letter to the _New York Times_.) Someday William Simon may understand this; meanwhile, it’s time for libertarians to proclaim the real truth: Militarism and the free market don’t mix. —BB ## To each his own foreign policy Many Americans justly feel angered by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. While Soviet troops ruthlessly kill hundreds of innocent Afghans, the millions of us looking on feel helpless, a feeling that only adds to our anger and frustration. While it is natural for us to feel that we must be able to do something to right the Soviet government’s wrongs, we should carefully examine policies born of anger and frustration. Such policies are seldom right. President Carter’s main reaction to the crisis has been to embargo grain that Americans had planned to sell to the Soviet Union. Is this action right? It enforces “morality” by taking away each individual’s freedom to decide the issue for himself. If I decide to sell grain to the Soviets, I cannot do so, under penalty of fine or imprisonment. If I decide the best way to respond to the Soviet invasion is to buy up grain that would otherwise be sold to the Soviet Union, I cannot do that, because the Carter government has already done it for me—using the money of innocent Americans, many of whom have different views on the issue. Carter’s actions suggest that he considers himself the only American who has a right to decide moral questions. He has a right to think that, but damn his almighty gall in denying our right to act individually and peacefully on the basis of our own moral convictions. The grain embargo will claim other innocent victims besides Americans who lose their freedom to choose. But before considering them, let us consider what the President must do in order to make an embargo effective. He must go much further than simply embargoing the USSR. He must cause a net reduction in the world grain supply. And he cannot do this simply by selling the grain to another country, since that country could turn around and resell it to the Soviets. Nor can he do it by using the grain to produce gasohol, since gasohol production facilities cannot be expanded that quickly. These grain supplies will still be on the market. Even if Carter simply withholds the grain to sell it in future years, he will not have much effect on world supplies since speculators, anticipating an increased supply and therefore a lower price in the future, will put their reserves on the market now. Carter’s policy can thus be effective only if he destroys grain and thereby drives up the world price. This brings us to the other victims. Higher prices will victimize not only the Russians but also the residents of all other grain-import-ing nations. And what do we mean by “Russians,” anyway? We are speaking of 260-million individual people, not some undifferentiated glob of humanity. Carter’s embargo will force the already oppressed Russians (that is, most of the population) to give up much of their already meager consumption of meat, but we can be sure that Brezhnev and his Kremlin buddies will not miss any meat from their diets. What is the rationale behind such a policy? It must be that if you harm the Russian people in order to protest the Soviet government’s being in Afghanistan the Russian people will blame the Soviet government, which, feeling the heat, will be more likely to leave Afghanistan. This thinking assumes that just because we see the Soviet government as the bad guy and the US government as the good guy, so will the Russian people. They might see it that way, but an equally plausible case could be made that the Russian people, resenting the US-enforced deprivation, will blame the United States and support their own government. They have a long history of supporting their government, no matter how tyrannical, in the face of hostile foreign governments, and the Soviet government’s monopoly of information sources within the Soviet Union makes this result even more likely. Furthermore, forbidding US athletes and other US residents from attending the Olympics in Moscow would only prevent valuable contact between residents of both countries, which will strengthen the Soviet government’s information monopoly and make the Russian people even more susceptible to Soviet propaganda. Moreover, to the extent it is effective, the embargo can only make America’s existence less valuable to the Soviet Union and increase the probability that the Soviet government will try to annihilate us. Trade promotes interdependence between nations. Admittedly, predicting how the Russian people will react to the embargo is difficult. But that makes it all the more important that each American be allowed to choose his own strategy. As the late George Meany said when American longshoremen boycotted shipments of grain to the Soviet Union during detente, “foreign policy is too damned important to be left to the Secretary of State.” Let each person make his own prediction about the effects of an embargo and let each person act on his own prediction. Americans who think an embargo will only make things worse should be free to refrain from participating in it—even indirectly by being taxed to support it. On the other hand, Americans who think an embargo a good idea should be free to boycott the Soviet Union. They should be free to buy up goods that otherwise would go to the USSR and to refrain from selling goods to the USSR. If enough people were convinced that a boycott was a good idea, would a boycott be effective? Ask Rosa Parks. She is the black woman who sparked a boycott of the bus system in Montgomery, Alabama, 25 years ago, by refusing to sit at the back of a bus. □ —David R. Henderson